Thursday, February 25, 2010

Ubisoft DRM

Like pretty much everybody I am not a big fan of the various ways of "digital rights management" and copyright protection schemes that companies add to games and other media. Not that I think that pirates have the right to steal stuff as they want, but because in my experience any form of copyright protection has a higher chance of hindering legitimate buyers than it has to stop pirates.

Having said that, I find some of the foaming from the mouth comments about Ubisoft's latest DRM scheme a bit over the top. Most of the games I play are either MMORPGs, or bought via Steam, thus I already have the situation that I can't play when I'm not connected to the internet.

If somebody would write a long rant about how unfair it is that he or specific other people in special situations can't play World of Warcraft when they aren't connected to the internet, we would laugh and tell the guy to choose a different game. I think our response to Ubisoft DRM should be exactly the same: We put these games on the long list of games that require the internet, and play something else when we don't have an online connection. And then we point out to Ubisoft that they just lost a bunch of legit customers, while the pirates published a cracked version of those games on Bittorrent before us legit guys could even buy them in the stores.